Note: There is no question that
General William Booth did much good by founding the Salvation Army. However, I
have a serious problem doctrinally with the official position of the Salvation
Army on salvation. They teach...

We believe that
continuance in a state of salvation depends upon continued obedient faith in
Christ.

The implication is that salvation can be lost by not
continuing in faith. I believe this teaching was more out of ignorance of the
Bible than anything else. I believe that William Booth was a true believer and
that those in the salvation Army are saved; but they adhere to the
heresy that salvation can be
lost. Salvation is a free gift from God, which cannot be lost. Those who claim
to no longer be Christians were never saved in the first place. 1st John
2:19, "They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of
us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they
might be made manifest that they were not all of us." If saved, always
saved.

Salvationist

'William Booth started
out from Nottingham largely self-educated, penniless, and practically
friendless. He had one fixed idea. The whole of his effort and talent would be
directed to the one purpose - saving the world. Like his predecessor Wesley, he
took the whole world as his parish. So well did he succeed, that before he died,
his name was known in practically every country of that parish, and his
followers numbered in millions. He began with nothing, had no money, no powerful
friends, only his golden voice, his passion, and this vision of man reconciled
to God.' -Nottingham Journal

To Save the World

The
evangelist halted outside The Blind Beggar Tavern up the Mile End Road, East
London. He was a tall figure in a frock coat and wide-brimmed hat and his
piercing grey eyes looked out from a pale face. Drawing a book from beneath his
arm, he gave out the verse of a hymn and faces pressed against the pub's glass
windows. 'There is a heaven in East London for everyone,' he cried, 'for
everyone who will stop and think and look to Christ as a personal Saviour.'

From
the pub came a volley of jeers and oaths, followed by a rotten egg. The preacher
paused, egg running down his cheek, prayed, and turned west towards Hammersmith
and his lodgings. He made his way through savage fighting men, ragged
match-sellers, orange-women, and Irish flower girls clad only in soiled
petticoats with their bare feet covered in dirt; children with wolfish faces
gobbling up decaying food left by the street market, or swaying blind drunk in
tap-room doorways. He strode past crowded tenements and stinking alleys where
life was a just a struggle; and the dark alleys near the docks where the sick
and dying lay side by side on bare boards of fireless rooms under tattered
scraps of blanket.

'A large muckheap what the rich
grows their mushrooms on,' was how one pauper described East London. After
thirteen years as a Methodist Circuit Minister, the preacher was no stranger to
it. But as he walked home a conviction grew within him. Towards midnight when he
arrived at his lodgings, he found his six children in bed. His wife, Catherine
Booth, who worried over their precarious financial position, waited in the
living room. Excitedly he burst out: 'Darling, I've found my destiny!' Convinced
that the churches had failed the people, William Booth would set out to save the
world. The year was 1865.

Sneinton

Son
of a speculative builder, William Booth was born at 12 Notintone Place, a
red-brick terrace house at Sneinton, Nottingham, in 1829. William was taken away
from school at thirteen years of age and apprenticed to a pawnbroker when the
Booth family plunged into poverty - a mortgage was called in.

These were hungry years when local
stockingers were hard-hit by poor trading and the high price of bread caused
riots. Under the three brass balls, the sight of desperate, hungry mothers
pawning their weddings rings to feed their families became etched on William's
memory.

Life for the Booth family didn't
improve when his father died a year later and his mother and two sisters moved
to a shop on Goosegate selling toys and tape, needles and cotton. At the age of
fifteen William began to attend Wesley Chapel.

His conversion simply came at 11
o'clock one night in the streets of Nottingham while trudging home from a
meeting. As he himself recorded, he saw with sudden clarity that he must
renounce sin and atone to others for the wrongs he had done them. Kneeling at a
bare table in the Broad Street Chapel, he vowed: 'God should have all there was
of William Booth.'

Along with his friend, Will Sansom,
son of a well-to-do lace manufacturer, he began to emulate his hero John Wesley
who had preached in the open air to the downtrodden. His first sermon was
outside the house that the pair rented in Kidd Street. Standing on a chair to
sing and speak, he urged his listeners in where a room inside was the penitent
room.

Noticing that the poorest and most
degraded never came forward, William began to address open-air meetings in 'The
Bottoms', Nottingham's cruelest slum that housed the outcasts of the Industrial
Revolution.

One Sunday morning in 1846, William
led his 'gang of slummers' - ragged and dirty converts from 'The Bottoms' -
through the main entrance of the Wesley Chapel where they filed into the best
seats for worship. They were soon banished to using the rear entrance and
required to sit on obscure, backless, wooden benches behind the pulpit, out of
sight of the congregation. Methodism had become respectable.

William had one astonishing
conversion. 'Besom' Jack, a drunken broom-seller whose wife had been reduced to
begging tea-leaves from neighbours, became one of his devoted followers.

London

With
apprenticeship complete, almost friendless and penniless, equipped only with a
bible, the nineteen-year-old William traveled to London. For a while he worked
as a pawnbroker on weekdays and lay preached on a Sunday till a Methodist
Reformer and boot maker, Edward Rabbits, heard him preach and liked it. After
inviting him home to dinner, Rabbits offered him twenty shillings a week as an
evangelist. Within months the Reformers offered him a circuit at Spalding.

At one of the meetings of the
Reformers he met and fell in love with Catherine Mumford. Deeply attached to the
Methodist cause, she had already read the Bible several times and despite her
delicate health was no shrinking violet. She believed in the equality of the
sexes and unfailingly bolstered William at his times of despair. 'Never mind. Do
not give way. God loves you. He will sustain you,' she would say. To Catherine,
William was a man of destiny.

After eighteen months in charge of
the Spalding circuit for the Reformers, William began studying under Dr. Cooke
at the Methodist Connexion. So impressed was Dr. Cooke by William's love
of mankind that the youngster was soon appointed London Circuit Superintendent.

Traveling Evangelist

William
married Catherine (pictured right) in 1855, three years after their first
meeting. The couple had no settled home for he became the New Connexion's
traveling evangelist. Steaming up and down the country by train, they lived
precariously on £2 a week, rearing a young not altogether healthy family of
children that eventually totaled eight. Though an invalid herself, Catherine
found time to look after them, bake the bread, and help at meetings. Without
her, William later admitted, he could never have fulfilled his life's work.

At his whirlwind revival meetings,
William was averaging over twenty converts a day. In 1857 the Connexion cut
short Booth's travels and put him in charge of their Brighouse circuit in
Yorkshire where the Booths battled to improve the lot of seven-year-old mill
girls working a fourteen-hour day.

Two years later the Booths were
moved to Gateshead. To Catherine Booth, the Devil was a personal opponent and at
the Bethseda's Chapel, she herself began to preach. Many leading Methodists
shook their heads at this revolutionary step and wanted to curb these
independent Booths. With his wife's support, William soon broke with Methodist
New Connexion.

At thirty-two years of age with a
wife and four children to support, William Booth had hopeless prospects. 'All
Britain is now open to you,' a fellow evangelist told him but soon the chapels
of the New Connexion barred their doors to him. Undaunted, he hired secular
buildings, even a circus tent, to which the lost and degraded could come. The
Booths carried no dogma. All they wanted to do was to stand up in the market
place and sound off the glory of the Lord. Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist or
Mohammedan, it didn't matter - these were lost creatures who were in need of
comfort and hope.

The greatest preacher since Wesley,
Booth was a little flamboyant, a little melodramatic, but he roused thousands to
repentance and hope. 'Religion,' he said, 'means loving God with all your heart
and your neighbour as yourself.'

Catherine was also much in demand
as a preacher and in March 1865 she led revival services in the smoky dockland
parishes of East London. It was then that William began preaching at the Mile
End Waste where every fifth shop was a gin-shop. With a Bible under his arm, he
exhorted those outside the taverns to convert and it was here that his destiny
was made plain to him - saving those souls the churches didn't want to know.

In this same year, the hymn 'Onward
Christian Soldiers' was written.

THE FOUNDER OF THE
SALVATION ARMY

William Booth
began The Salvation Army in July 1865. Preaching to a small street
congregation in the slums of London, his spirit was as militant as that of a
professional soldier while battling an almost overwhelming enemy.

Thieves,
prostitutes, gamblers, and drunkards were among Booth's first converts to
Christianity. His congregations were desperately poor. He preached hope and
salvation. His aim was to lead them to Christ and link them to a church for
continued spiritual guidance.

Even though
Booth's followers were converted, churches did not accept them because of what
they had been. However, Booth gave their lives direction in both a spiritual
and practical manner and put them to work to save others who were like
themselves. They, too, preached and sang in the streets as a living testimony
to the power of God.

In 1867, Booth
had only 10 full-time workers. By 1874, the numbers had grown to 1,000
volunteers and 42 evangelists. They served under the name "The Christian
Mission" and Booth assumed the title of General Superintendent, although his
followers called him "General." Known as the "Hallelujah Army," the converts
spread out of the east end of London into neighboring areas and then to other
cities.

In 1878, Booth
was reading a printer's proof of the organization's annual report when he
noticed the statement, "the Christian Mission under the [sic] Superintendent's
of the Rev. William Booth is a volunteer army." He crossed out the words
"volunteer army" and penned in "Salvation Army." From those words came the
basis of the foundation deed of The Salvation Army which was adopted in August
of that same year.

The Salvation Army gained a foothold in the United
States by the work of Lieutenant Eliza Shirley, who had
left England to join her parents. She held the first meeting of The Salvation
Army in America in Philadelphia in 1879. In 1880, General Booth sent a party
of eight Salvationists, led by George Scott Railton, to officially begin the
work of The Salvation Army in the United States.

In 1886,
President Grover Cleveland received a delegation of Salvation Army officers
and gave the organization a warm personal endorsement. This was the first
recognition from the White House and was followed by similar receptions from
succeeding presidents of the United States. The Salvation Army expanded
rapidly to Canada, Australia, France, Switzerland, India, South Africa,
Iceland, Germany, and many other countries.

General Booth's
death in 1912 was a great loss to The Salvation Army. However, he had laid a
firm foundation for the organization. Today, The Salvation Army serves people
in 103 countries.

Booth, William

Booth, William,18291912, English
religious leader, founder and first general of the
Salvation Army,
b. Nottingham. Originally a local preacher for the Wesleyan Methodists, he
went (1849) to London and entered (1852) the ministry of the Methodist New
Connexion Church, but in 1861 he began independent evangelistic work. In 1865,
with the help of his wife, Catherine Booth, he started the East London Revival
Society (soon known as the Christian Mission) in Whitechapel, London. The
Christian Mission developed in 1878 into the Salvation Army. General Booth, a
remarkable organizer, traveled widely, winning recognition wherever he went.
In 1890 he published In Darkest England and the Way Out in
collaboration with W. T. Stead. See
Booth,
family; Booth,
Evangeline Cory.

On April 9,1865, Lee met Grant in the parlor of a
private home at Appomattox Court House. He surrendered his army and brought
an end to four long years of death and devastation called the Civil War.
In the same year a 36 year old Englishman by the name of William Booth
declared war on the powers of darkness by founding the Salvation Army.

One of the most effective weapons in General
Booth's arsenal was fervent prayer. It was not unusual for Booth to hold "an
all night of prayer" when he came to preach the Word of God. People would
flood the altars every where he went. "The power of God was wonderfully
manifest in the meetings . . . people were frequently, struck down,
overwhelmed with a sense of
the presence and power of God."

The Salvation
Army's success at freeing the captives was uncanny, especially when one
considers those who it strived to reach. General Booth's battle cry was "Go
for souls and go for the worst." The worst of sinners were saved, saloons were
closed and entire cities were shaken.

Booth's success attracted not only supporters but
also enemies. Those who served in the Army were pelted with hot coals, sprayed
with tar and burning sulfur, beat, stoned and even kicked to death in the
streets. The Salvation Army resisted their enemies with a cheerful "God bless
you", and a prayer. General Booth, himself was often in the thick of it. When
spit on during the Midlands tour, Booth encouraged his fellow soldiers, "Don't
rub it off - it's a medal!"

Night after night Booth would come home bleeding
and bruised after being attacked for preaching in the slums of England. After
such nights of testing he would take his wife's hand and say, "Kate, let me
pray with you." After praying with Catherine he would rise from his knees
armed with fresh courage and hope. Booth needed all the valor his wife
Catherine could inspire
in him. She encouraged him, "if we get tired we had better go and be done
with, anything is better than a dead church." Despite the grinding pressures
of the ministry the Booths had a happily united family. The General had nine
children and loved to play and romp with them, especially in their favorite
game of "Fox and Geese."

Once while traveling, General Booth's car was
detained. He took advantage of the opportunity and exhorted some idle factory
workers. He said, "some of you men never pray, you gave up praying long ago.
But I'm going to say to you, won't you pray for your children that they may be
different?" Within minutes 700 men knelt in silent prayer.

At another time, two Salvation Army officers set
out to found a new work, only to meet with failure and opposition.
Frustrated and tired they appealed to the General to close the rescue mission.
General Booth sent back a telegram with two words on it, "TRY TEARS."
They followed his advice and they witnessed a mighty revival.

During the course of William Booths ministry he
traveled 5,000,000 miles and preached 60,000 sermons. God help us in this
desperate and distracted day in which we live to heed the General's advice.
"Work as if everything depended upon your work, and pray as if everything
depended upon your prayer."

References Used:

"The General Next To God" by Richard Collier
"Deeper Experiences of Famous Christians" by James G. Lawson
"The Life of General William Booth" by H. Begbie

Chronological History

1829 - William Booth was born at 12 Notintone
Place in Sneinton, Nottingham.

1842 - Taken out of school at 13 years old, to
become an apprentice pawn broker. His family had been plunged into
poverty.

1843 - Father dies.

1845 - Starts to attend Wesley Chapel. During
this time he believed that he must renounce sin and atone to others for
the wrongs he had done to them. William begins to address open air
meetings.

1846 - Leads converts from the slums into the
Wesley Chapel, they're quickly moved to the back of the hall. William
becomes the New Connexion's travelling evangelist.

1855 - Marries Catherine.

1857 - William begins gathering 20 converts a
day, Connexion cut short Booth's travels and put him in charge of their
Brighouse circuit in Yorkshire.

1859 - William and Catherine break with Methodist
New Connexion. William goes alone, and becomes a respected preacher.

1865 - William begins preaching around London's
Mile End, trying to save souls that the church didn't want to know.

1875 - After his first sermons at Mile End,
William has 26 stations. Around this time they were known as the
Volunteer army.

1878 - Their name is changed to the Salvation
Army. Various achievements are made, including groundbreaking work with
the poor and a labour exchange.

"The greatness of a man's power is the
measure of his surrender." -General William Booth

Comments from webmaster of
www.Jesus-is-Savior...

Life is all about soulwinning! What does it profit a
man if you feed him, give him a few dollars, maybe even give him a place to stay
for the night...if he dies in his sins and goes to burn in hell for all eternity.
Jerry Lewis did a wonderful thing in trying to raise money for research to
benefit sickly children with muscular dystrophy, but what about their souls? There are thousands
of charitable organizations all across America and the world that are helping
people in many wonderful ways, but what about their souls? The
Salvation Army which had once aggressively preached the gospel to lost
sinners has sadly lost much of that zeal. When General William Booth
founded the Salvation Army, his main purpose was to go out preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ to a lost and
dying world. Today, the organization is NOT known for aggressively trying
to win souls to Christ, but rather as a humanitarian outreach.
Regrettably, you won't find the plan of salvation on their
website unless you go digging for
it. The Salvation Army's priorities clearly have changed since the
days of William Booth. Where is the aggressive soul-winning?

The
Salvation Army was not readily accepted in the 19th century.
Their rivals were known as the "Skeleton Army" who persecuted
them fiercely. Those Christians were persecuted because they were
aggressively trying to spread the gospel.

Things
have deteriorated since then. What's with the Santa Clauses? I've
yet to meet a Salvation Army Santa Claus who has tried to witness to me
concerning the gospel of Jesus Christ. Instead, he just wants my money.
Unfortunately, the Salvation Army has left their first love
(Revelation 2:4). I hear of all
the wonderful things they are doing today to help other people, but what about the
souls of men? I'm not trying to be critical of anyone, I'm simply asking
the life-and-death question, "What about the souls of lost sinners?"

"For what shall it profit a
man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" -Mark 8:36

The purpose of
this article I'm writing is not to criticize the Salvation Army or it's members,
but to call them back to their original purpose of winning lost souls to Jesus
Christ. I've read that 90 cents out of every dollar donated to the
Salvation Army goes directly to help the less fortunate. That is truly
admirable. Helping the less fortunate is a wonderful deed, but what about
their souls? Providing hot-chocolate for fire-fighters is a great deed,
but what about their souls? Hell is real friend!
Hell is a place of fire and
horrible torment! America is going to hell in the midst of the most
charitable country on the face of this earth. How can this be? Most
so-called "Christian" organizations (including churches) have their priorities
backward.